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Investigation

What were the characteristics of Queensland’s mining communities in the late 1800s?

Resource Sheet 3

Life on the goldfields – Gympie

This was in October, 1867, and at that time Gympie was an uninhabited creek in the heart of the Queensland bush… When I visited it a very few months afterwards, two large towns had arisen on this wild and desolate spot, and 7,000 inhabitants were busily engaged in the work of gold-digging…

Each township has its long, narrow, main street, winding its unformed, crooked way through the bush, as house after house and store after store is quickly run up by newly- arrived adventurers. Banks, stores, shanties, and other buildings of wood and iron, had sprung, as if by magic, from the ground; and amongst these you may see a circulating library, two or three theatres, and other pretentious erections, that one would not expect to find in such a truly infant settlement.

CH Allan, A Visit to Queensland and Her Goldfields, London, Chapman and Hall 1870, pp 119–20, 133.

Gympie gold diggings

A streetscape of Gympie Gold diggings during the 1870s

Streetscape of Gympie Gold diggings, c 1870s, Hume Photograph Collection, University of Queensland (Fryer Library), Image 019.

Life on the goldfields – Cape River

The Cape in 1868 was a decidedly rough locality, there being fully two thousand five hundred men, representing many nationalities, and among them the scum of all the Southern Gold Fields… Gold was easily obtained and much more easily spent. Dreadful stuff, called whisky, rum and brandy, was sold in shilling drinks, and there was no need to wonder that many of the poor fellows, after the usual spree, became raving maniacs. Picture in your imagination a mob of two hundred or three hundred half drunk semi-madmen running amok with each other in the brutal fights which were a daily occurrence!

Hill, WRO, Forty-five years’ experiences in North Queensland 1865-1905: With a few incidents in England 1844 to 1861, H Pole, Brisbane, 1907.

‘The Chinese invasion’

Chinese gold digger starting for work, c 1860s, Richard Daintree, State Library of Queensland, 60526.

There are at present located on the Palmer 15,000 Chinese… Besides this loss of wealth they displace a large number of the European gold miners, who contribute so largely to swell the revenue and who also invest their earnings towards the further development of the resources of the colony.

Yes, if immediate steps are not taken John [China] will monopolise the labor of the mines, the farms, the railroad, and the factory, and our colonial youths left as drones in the market. Even so near home as Cooktown we find already the Chinese drayman, packer, carter, publican, doctor, aye, shame to say, that even the telegraph messenger is of Chinese extraction. The free labor of the European and the servile labor of the Chinese cannot exist together. 

JF Conway, Northern Miner, 26 May 1877.

On the road to the Palmer goldfield

A drawing of Chinese people on the road to the Palmer Goldfield, Queensland, 1875

Drawing of Chinese people on the road to the Palmer Goldfield, Queensland, 1875, State Library of Queensland, 57820.

Petition to the Queensland Parliament

  1. That your petitioners regard with great alarm and apprehension the continued influx of Chinese into the colony there being now not less than eighteen thousand Chinese in Northern Queensland, being in some places from ten to fifteen to one in excess of the European population.
  2. That your petitioners pray your Honourable House to totally prohibit the further introduction of Chinese, and also to exclude the Chinese now in the colony from actual mining operations on the gold fields.

This was in October, 1867, and at that time Gympie was an uninhabited creek in the heart of the Queensland bush… When I visited it a very few months afterwards, two large towns had arisen on this wild and desolate spot, and 7,000 inhabitants were busily engaged in the work of gold-digging…

Queensland, Votes and Proceedings 2, 1877, p 1203.